A Sign of Things to Come? Youth and Politics: Regimes, Values and Agency

Analysing youth as a political agent offers a distinct perspective on the ways in which political regimes build their community, the extent to which they can influence the behaviour and opinions of society, and how a part of society reacts to such attempts. The introduction to this special issue demonstrates how young people have engaged politically over time and their changing political values by rooting these components within the overarching question of the relationship between political, economic and cultural regimes and youth. A further aim is to illuminate the links between the various contributions to the collection and to provide a cohesive conceptual framework for the analysis of youth and politics. The proposed research agenda and central questions can guide future investigations related to the conceptualisation of youth and the mobilisation of young people. Studying young people across the (formerly) communist space allows us to uncover particularly fascinating generational dynamics given the profound ruptures that have occurred across the region. Studying the region through the prism of generational change and continuity enables an understanding of the intersection between global and national or local dynamics and the political values and agency of young people.

Youth and politics: regimes, values and agency

Youth is the symbolic face of, and young people are the physical force behind, many protests that have occurred over the last few years, from those which erupted in Belarus in the aftermath of the presidential election in the summer of 2020 to the various protests occurring across Russia and the increased level of political activism in Central Asia. Whereas some young people take to the streets to oppose incumbent regimes and hierarchical structures, others express sympathy for regressive or nationalistic politics. Young people are therefore both a potential resource for the stability of any political system and a challenge to it. This feature explains why youth has had particular political and social salience at various moments in history, particularly during moments of regime crisis.

This special issue assesses the political and the symbolic relevance of youth in different cultural and political settings. Young people have mobilised for a wide variety of issues, challenging—but also at times consolidating—a country’s status quo. Factions of young people have (been) mobilised to support democratic freedoms (Feuer 1969; Hilwig 2009; Maeckelbergh 2011) but also fascism (Stachura 1975; Clark 2015; Berezin 2018), communism (Neumann 2011) or Catholicism (Whitney 2009). Indeed, contradictions have always been part of the political and social mobilisation of young people. Therefore, the term ‘youth’ should not be understood as referring to a homogeneous or stable community of young people—factions of young people tend to oppose one another in political or cultural terms.

The essays in this special issue explore a number of key questions that have remained conceptually and empirically underexplored when addressing the role of young people in political and social developments, particularly in a comparative perspective (Schwartz & Winkel 2016). First, how do political regimes try to influence young people’s political values and their scope for agency? How do different factions of young people respond to such attempts? Second, what kind of political and social values have young people expressed over time? What factors contribute to the emergence and the development of these values? Third, in what forms of political agency do underlying political and social values express themselves?

Speaking to the three sets of questions, the introduction discusses the contributions to this issue through a shared analytical frame, focusing on the structures determining the environment that young people operate in, the values and attitudes that they express, and their political agency. Situating the individual contributions in this frame helps us to understand the multiplicity of political realities amongst young people, their political desires, and the factors influencing change and continuity in what young people are longing for.

Structure for young people: political, economic and cultural regimes

Structural factors, such as political, economic and cultural conditions, provide a context within which young people have to operate. Such factors differ in their origins and the extent to which they have relevance for all members of the young generation. Whereas the political regime has a major bearing on the scope for political action and the everyday reality, the regime’s significance for young people can only be understood with reference to the cultural context or the economic conditions that they experience. The threat of unemployment or a culture of obedience and acquiescence matter when we study the emergence or the absence of contestation, not only when expressed by young people (Almond & Verba 1963).

The essays in this special issue cover a variety of political, cultural and economic regimes. The political dimension includes the spectrum of democratic and autocratic governance, alongside different memories of how these political systems came to exist. This latter aspect is important, as the mode of transition, questions of transitional justice and the memories of the previous regime are foundational for young people’s political imaginary and the legitimacy of subsequent political projects more broadly (Nalepa 2010; Bernhard & Kubik 2014). Political and cultural regimes interlink when it comes to the political and discursive opportunity structures for young people’s public engagement (McCammon et al. 2007). The authors study changing conventions in the cultural sphere but also examine how the cultural expressions of young activists relate to a country’s cultural and political context. Lastly, present and anticipated economic realities and an individual’s relative economic position are of far-reaching relevance to young people’s living conditions, their political desires but also their position vis-à-vis the state.

These three structural dimensions intersect and contribute to young people’s everyday realities and influence the degree of autonomy they may enjoy. Youth and education policies are a clear illustration of the ways in which these structures come together, demonstrating the variations between the ways in which autocratic and other political regimes address the topic of generational change whilst trying to preserve their own institutional continuity. How young people are addressed offers intriguing insights into a political regime’s capabilities and visions, going beyond a black-box view that is restricted to analysing political supply and institutional design.

A most striking shift concerns the ways in which authoritarian states have enlarged their spectrum to complement open repression and violent crackdown on oppositional protests by actively mobilising the young citizenry, their aim being to inculcate a sense of loyalty and mission for their country, which may legitimise the regime more broadly. Moreover, a depoliticisation of young people’s activities is often part of this strategy. Autocratic states thus strive to get young people involved as citizens while allowing some room for manoeuvre, even if the understanding of citizenship that young people espouse and the ways in which they exercise it can deviate significantly from the official version (Nartova 2019). Nevertheless, the young people who get involved and potentially develop new forms of civic engagement have to do so within the tightly controlled spaces of an autocracy that strives to ensure that the youth support what the incumbent regime defines as the common good.

The capacity to speak to young people is, moreover, of crucial symbolic value. Their overt support allows every political regime to appear dynamic. If young people openly turn against the existing regime in the name of the renewal that the new generation embodies, the symbolic failure of the political, economic or cultural regime is particularly vexing. Young people involved in political protests (Zelinska 2017) and their opposition to economic neoliberalism (Reimer 2012) or restrictive abortion laws and the stigmatising of women who underwent abortion (Korolczuk 2016) all achieve strong public resonance, even if they do not necessarily lead to the desired outcomes.

Authoritarian states also aspire to be dynamic and attract young people’s loyalty. However, the flat hierarchies and genuine possibilities for involvement that are attractive to many young people today are hard to mimic in authoritarian settings, as they are incompatible with the fundamental principles behind this form of rule. Across the spectrum of autocracies, one therefore encounters diverse strategies for controlling the spaces for young people’s political involvement. Some regimes have recognised that loose top-down control of young people’s political involvement risks causing apathy rather than increasing their commitment to the regime.

Jérôme Doyon and Konstantinos Tsimonis's study of the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party has engaged young people over time reveals a fear of apathy and depoliticisation, resulting in a radical shift in the control of universities under Xi Jinping to ensure young people’s loyalty. To what extent can the control of universities be centralised and still correspond to the desires of young students and, conversely, to what extent is a central government willing to trust local actors in implementing the central guidelines? In the same vein, on what points should the party exercise control and what scope for manoeuvre should be left to young people themselves, in order to reduce apathy and ensure that their involvement reflects more than just a paper commitment?¹ Increasingly, then, as Doyon and Tsimonis demonstrate, the Chinese government has decided that compulsory ideological education from an early age (that is, from primary school) is a promising approach, alongside volunteering and training programmes, to make the Communist Party a more dynamic entity which no longer merely seeks to maximise membership numbers.

The case of China demonstrates just how much effort it takes to control young people. In China under Xi Jinping, the control of students includes military drills alongside monitoring of young people’s social and political worldviews through the party’s involvement in academic matters—teaching and research—notably at elite universities. Hardly any room is left for independent student activities. The present approach contrasts markedly with the token commitment that Chinese leaders displayed during Hu Jintao’s leadership, when the party was seen as being distant from the daily lives of young people and risked becoming an empty shell, rather than representing a space for the ideological formation of young cadres.

A loyal youth generation is desired, whereas autocratic regimes may even fear a seemingly apathetic youth for its subversive potential. This symbolic and physical importance of young people becomes particularly clear in Ivana Dobrivojević Tomić’s case study on post-war Yugoslavia. In her essay, she studies how the communist regime’s efforts at reconstructing the nation and modernising the economic system combined nurturing and narrowly controlling the spaces for young people. Indeed, the symbolic importance of gaining young people’s expression of support for the state was seen as so significant that it outweighed the actual economic benefits of having young people in the workforce. Even more, she identifies stark mismatches between young people’s qualifications and the demands of the economy. Although this contributed to the Yugoslav economy being hardly competitive, considerable value was attached to getting young people on board, illustrating the extent to which the economic, cultural and political regimes intersect. It was also expected that young people would be potential drivers of a social transformation, and in particular contribute to making the ideology of brotherhood and unity a lived reality based on their economic visibility. However, her detailed historical analysis demonstrates how inadequate many of the award schemes were and that it remained notoriously difficult to address young people, given the profound mismatch, for instance, between education, young people’s professional ambitions and the requirements of the labour market. In particular, the compulsory brigades often led to poor-quality work and disappointment amongst young people and leaders alike.

In the two examples of post-war Yugoslavia and modern China, coercion was used to ensure the involvement of young people. In Russia, yet another autocratic regime, a different way of setting the incentives for young people’s involvement can be discerned. Anna Schwenck unpacks how the Russian state directly and indirectly funds activities that are supportive of its conservative moral outlook on the world and sets economic incentives for young people who may gain significant sums with their independent pursuit of activities that support the state’s social vision. The combination of a neoliberal economic logic and authoritarian coercion provides some flexibility and can appear, at least on the surface, as dynamic and responsive, as it may appeal to those young people who seek to gain financial rewards and reputation. If successful, the behaviour of such young people in an authoritarian system can become a powerful symbol of the regime’s ideological equilibrium.

Such ideological stabilisation is usually what authoritarian regimes strive for when designing policies that address young people. Indeed, through the symbolic mobilisation of youth, regimes can construct a discursive link into an abstract future and potentially into the country’s past, thereby contributing to the country’s symbolic and ideological stabilisation. Another case study on Russia demonstrates exactly this desire to cement an unambiguous relationship to an imagined past community through policies addressing young people. Here, Jussi Lassila and Anna Sanina illuminate the impact of Russian patriotic policies on the young generation. Although it is well-established that the Kremlin puts significant efforts into shaping young people’s identity, it is much less clear what various young people make of such attempts and to what extent the Russian state reaches into society (Klymenko 2016; Konkka 2020). Lassila and Sanina provide evidence of a rather limited reach in Russia, notably when compared to the significantly more rigorous and far-reaching interventions in China.

The ideological outlook of young citizens, and of society more broadly, will never simply mirror state policies. Rather, with the interplay of cultural and economic factors and the multiple agents that constitute the state—encompassing, for instance, the military, the Orthodox Church, museums and educational institutions in Russia—young people are exposed to significant contradictions in terms of what the state ideology might signify. The messages that citizens receive and what autocrats wish to convey can therefore diverge substantively (Dukalskis & Gerschewski 2017). With a bottom-up perspective, Lassila and Sanina unpack the rather limited reach of patriotic youth policies and a patriotic discourse and demonstrate that young people’s actual understandings of patriotism align badly with what the state wants. One explanation for this mismatch might well be the fact that Russian youth policy only receives modest funding, despite the alarmist discourse surrounding its shortcomings and the concerns about the country’s future that are voiced in relation to the failures of youth patriotic education. Rather than a change of strategy, ever more attempts are made to ensure that young citizens grow up with a patriotic mindset by means that have already proved inappropriate in the past.

Autocratic polities, moreover, try to use available cultural resources to their advantage. In Belarus, a somewhat more subtle way of influencing young people’s views—prior to the violent repression of independent mobilisation in relation to the presidential election in August 2020—can be identified with a more permissive take on the expression of independent Belarusian cultural identity. Lukashenka tried to cultivate a civic identity and increase young people’s civic engagement for the state by being more permissive in relation to the expression of a genuine Belarusian identity in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. As Ryhor Nizhnikau and Kristiina Silvan argue in their essay, the cultural component has been a crucial element in the regime’s strategy to create a loyal youth as the country’s political leadership realised that it cannot simply govern in a top-down fashion in the long run but needed to establish a popular basis of legitimacy. The far-reaching violence that characterised the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election then demonstrated how quickly such a soft approach can end once the autocracy’s survival is at stake.

For a top-heavy autocracy, the genuine involvement of young people remains a considerable challenge and it is hard to assess the extent to which young people’s involvement represents more than a paper commitment. In Belarus, Lukashenka attempted to mobilise young people during elections and increase their cultural loyalty—with an emphasis on the Belarusian language and a prudent shift in a more nationalised historical narrative. The leader wanted to gain young people’s support for an independent Belarus, of which the incumbent regime was to be understood as the guarantor. To develop links between the state and society, genuine forms of cooperation between state and non-state actors can address the low level of trust in state institutions—in Belarus, these have been implemented through local initiatives and volunteering, even though these initiatives have not increased the president’s approval ratings amongst young people. Indeed, while young people have embraced support for an independent Belarus, no longer willing to think about Belarus merely through its Soviet past, they have not embraced Lukashenka’s rule. Only a consistent, far-reaching and repressive state intervention may, as the Chinese example suggests, contribute to a loyal young generation and stifle the genuine desire of some young people to take to the streets against the incumbent regime.

To gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics in political regimes, a subnational perspective with a focus on the local level can reveal further nuances (Walther et al. 2020). Such a perspective underlines that there is greater room for agency at the regional level, reflecting on the opportunities of various political elites but also regional and local identities and traditions. This agency can manifest itself in increased liberties but also coercion. Such regional differences are explored by Olena Nikolayenko, who shows that it is important to systematically consider the subnational variation within Russia to gain a deeper understanding of the contradictory dynamics across the country. As the different degrees of student involvement in the 2017 anti-corruption protests led by Alexei Naval’nyi illustrate, local legacies and political dynamics go a long way in explaining students’ participation in protests. The most important factors here include the quality of the local university education, the local history of activism and the broader political environment that characterises a city. Even an increasingly centralised system of governance cannot easily cancel out such factors.

The Soviet Union itself was a relatively complex authoritarian construct with a high degree of centralisation of power and decision-making in Moscow and a locally embedded subnational network that guaranteed the redistribution of benefits and ensured that the central rules were actually put into practice. This led to significant asymmetry across the USSR (Gel’man et al. 2005), which was further exacerbated by its ultimate collapse (Stoner-Weiss 2006). In post-Soviet Russia until at least 2005, the local realities of electoral authoritarianism, in particular the degree of electoral competitiveness, have been found to differ as much as they do between states (Saikkonen 2016).

Research on the Soviet Union further highlights the long-lasting effects of subnational dynamics, notably the persistence of deeply rooted cultural, religious and national identities. Religious identities in Central Asia, for instance, were rarely eradicated or replaced with a new overarching Soviet identity (Keller 1992). The desires of local elites across the vast Soviet territory often clashed with the priorities defined in Moscow, most strikingly in Central Asia (Loring 2014). But as Stefan Kirmse illustrates in this issue, the transformation of specific local identities has always been in tension with the supranational aspirations of political leaders, even if young people have proven to be more receptive to such ideas. Kirmse’s contribution also highlights how international contacts during the Soviet era, notably to other socialist countries or the global South, had a stabilising effect on the existing political order.

Taken together, the regimes covered in this issue expose meaningful variations both at present and historically. Some of today’s communist and post-communist autocracies share similar approaches in their attempts to mould young people into loyal citizens of the nation, although the level of success differs significantly between countries such as Belarus, Russia and China. At the same time, it is important to understand the historical conditions under which these policies emerged, particularly when such countries have undergone profound transformations. In newly founded states—such as Yugoslavia—the focus on the young generation presented a symbolic opportunity to project the regime into its future while also mobilising a much-needed workforce.

Young people’s values: past legacies, present assessments, future expectations

The values young people express closely relate to their political involvement—they are the basis for it and develop further through such involvement. Young people’s values also respond to present and past cultural, economic and political conditions and future expectations. Although ‘youth’ is a collective noun and is used as such in the political and, sometimes, the public discourse, young people have obviously never shared a single, uniform, social and political outlook. Instead, they are characterised by significant political diversity, reflecting the diversity that is visible in society at large (Krawatzek & Sasse 2018). Indeed, young people may well express sympathies for various forms of political radicalisation, including religious or ideological extremes (Pilkington et al. 2018).

An important component of the values young people express are their views on past political and ideological systems that existed in their country or elsewhere. Strikingly, young Americans’ alleged longing for socialism regularly gets the attention of the wider public.² Not unlike in the United States, young people across Eastern Europe are known to yearn for a past that they never experienced personally. Young people may, for instance, express a longing for an (allegedly) stable and prosperous past that they have encountered only through narratives.³ Comparing Ukraine and Russia, Nikolayenko (2008) reveals important differences in views on the USSR’s dissolution and further underlines how crucial subnational variation is in understanding the appeal of such narratives about the past.

Forming one’s identity is, beyond doubt, a crucial element of being young (Côté & Levine 2015). Determining one’s identity in relation to different social groups—encompassing family, friends, gender, local belonging—also has political manifestations and impacts on young people’s political ideals. In terms of national identity, different cultural and geographical layers intersect in intriguing ways, as local, national and supra- or transnational notions of belonging need to be balanced. In this collection, Kirmse most clearly engages with the latter as he studies how the Soviet Union attempted to utilise youth to construct a supranational identity and thereby to contribute to the Soviet project of integration. In a practical sense, however, as the international initiatives studied by Kirmse highlight, the national identity was frequently cultivated alongside the desired overarching supranational layer. Such a coexistence of different layers of identity would appear to be most appropriate for thinking about the unbound nature of identities as a local, national or supranational blend (Lehmann 2015).

A further attempt at identity-building, placing the emphasis on the national level, is demonstrated by the Belarusian case (see Nizhnikau & Silvan, this issue). In an uncertain geopolitical climate, the country’s leadership, which for many years sought economic dependence on Russia and far-reaching cultural convergence, has prudently changed its position and cultivated a more independent outlook on Belarusian identity, including attaching a higher value to distinctly Belarusian historical and cultural practices and the Belarusian language. In that regard, crafting historical memories for young people is core to the regime’s efforts to create a loyal youth cohort. Some autocrats believe that allowing young people to express a cultural identity is a potentially more promising way to engage them. However, as the events of 2020 demonstrated, efforts at soft identity construction can turn against the regime. The distinctly Belarusian identity that was visible during the protests and was reinforced by them was a way to criticise the regime (Kulakevich 2020).

The post-Soviet regimes in Belarus and Russia emphasise patriotism and conservative values that are to be transmitted to young people. In Putin’s Russia, patriotism is intended to connect the sense of belonging that young people internalise and the collective Russian identity that the state wishes to craft (Goode 2018). However, as Lassila and Sanina underline, a significant gap exists between young people’s actual understanding of patriotism and the understanding of patriotism promoted by the state. Their study looks specifically at those who are positioned in an intriguing vacuum, as their period of primary socialisation occurred during the 1990s, when the state was establishing itself and lacked a programme and the financial commitment for young people’s patriotic upbringing.

The people studied by Lassila and Sanina experience today’s patriotic education through their own children, as the Russian state’s patriotic education programmes have expanded significantly. The young parents, children of the 1990s, have developed their own understanding of patriotism in a setting with a significantly lower capacity for state involvement than today’s children and they now need to position themselves in their role as mothers and fathers within the current state’s efforts to promote patriotism. When the young parents are asked about their own views on patriotism, a somewhat romantic notion of the Soviet era emerges; this nostalgia, however, is largely disconnected from Russia’s present and even past political realities. Rather than romanticising the old political system, these young people express a longing on the individual level, taken out of the corresponding political and economic context at the time. Lassila and Sanina identify further lines of tension between the state’s view on patriotism and what young people strive for. One particularly noteworthy aspect relates to the importance of personal growth in the individual understandings of patriotism, the capacity for young people to become actors and entrepreneurs—a clear difference to the state’s emphasis on rituals and a rigid articulation of patriotism.⁴ Moreover, the dimension of militarism, which is central to the state’s definition of patriotism today, has little resonance amongst young people. Overall, then, the analysis demonstrates that these policies fail to genuinely address young people as active and voluntary subjects—instead, the patriotic education programmes tend to conceive of young people as objects, reinforcing the disconnect between state and society.

Throughout history, attempts to render youth loyal to the state have repeatedly failed to realise their stated aims. It cannot be taken for granted that particularistic identities and the corresponding religious, family or class-based values can be attenuated through education programmes so as to transform young people into loyal citizens of their nation. The various attempts across the post-Soviet space to mobilise young people in state-controlled youth organisations and speak to them through patriotic education often fail to reach their official goals. Instead, essays in this collection convey a stark mismatch between young people’s desires on the one hand, and state programmes and top-down youth organisations on the other.

Such an expectation that young people may change engrained identities can also be identified back in time. In post-war Yugoslavia, it was expected that young people would contribute to overcoming the particularistic identities of the numerous social and ethnic groups and that it might be possible to mould the new generation into a larger supranational identity (Dobrivojević Tomić, this issue). However, even though young people’s political and social outlook and their aspirations might well change in a profound way in moments of transition, Dobrivojević Tomić underlines that it is not a foregone conclusion that young people will not reiterate their parents’ and grandparents’ stereotypes related to ethnicity or gender. Along these lines, Schwenck demonstrates how some young people become actively involved in furthering conservative social identities in Russia.

Generational replenishment, then, does not necessarily lead to changes in values.⁵ Instead, persisting attitudinal legacies have increasingly come to the attention of researchers. Communism and other authoritarian regimes create important legacies that are transmitted over time, even to those members of society who have not experienced the previous communist or otherwise authoritarian past themselves (Pop-Eleches & Tucker 2017; Dinas & Northmore-Ball 2020; Neundorf & Pop-Eleches 2020). Dobrivojević Tomić identifies similar attitudinal legacies when highlighting the persistence of certain values beyond moments of rupture as profound as World War II. Gender norms, for instance, are known to be particularly hard to change and were a serious obstacle to the integration of young women into the workforce in post-1945 Yugoslavia, when girls in factories continued to be associated with immorality.

Educational opportunities undeniably impact young people’s sense of belonging (Nikolayenko, this issue). It is this link between higher education and a more critical outlook on social and national issues that is often feared in autocracies, which therefore make considerable efforts to control the universities. Moreover, foreign influence is seen as a potential threat to the loyalty of young people: in the (formerly) communist countries, it is primarily Western influence that is seen as threatening the tight grip on young people. Indeed, as Félix Krawatzek and Gwendolyn Sasse highlight, transnational connections are associated with more critical political attitudes amongst young people in today’s Russia. Their study demonstrates the importance of transnational connections for a substantial proportion of the youth population and emphasises the extent to which the transnational networks that can follow emigration relate to the political attitudes of those who are embedded in these networks. This is particularly relevant for young people, who are more likely to emigrate due to demographic factors.

Young people as agents: political opposition and legitimisation

Young people’s political involvement is constantly evolving, expressing their changed underlying values but also responding to the specific context in which they are embedded. Whereas young people feature less prominently in conventional electoral forms of political participation than adults across many countries (Kimberlee 2002; Pilkington & Pollock 2015), they engage more in flash mobs, pickets, protests and online campaigns (Bessant et al. 2021). Such non-conventional forms of political involvement challenge the very notion of what we include as political in our analyses (Harris et al. 2010; Cammaerts et al. 2014). Tellingly, surveys asking specifically about political interest usually confirm that young people are less interested than adults and do not regard the formal political process as a vehicle for expressing themselves (Dermody et al. 2010; Volkov 2018). This facet is not unique to youth in (formerly) communist countries, although their socialisation in non-transparent and frequently undemocratic systems has contributed to their sense of being disaffected and not represented.

An analysis of the political involvement of youth beyond a narrow electoral realm illuminates a great diversity of political engagement, behaviour that enables young people to discover their agency in the political, social or environmental sphere. Forms of engagement include cultural expressions of political views, participation in protests, online activism and involvement in student organisations. Indeed, universities serve as hotbeds of protest, particularly in autocratic regimes (Boren 2001; Fichter 2016; Dahlum 2018). As a political force, young people have been significant in the unfolding of political events at the local, national and even transnational level. It seems virtually impossible to understand the recent history of countries like Poland without analysing the importance of student movements (Junes 2015). However, 68 remains the most potent symbol in this regard, referring variously to the events of May 1968 in France but also to the youth mobilisation across Europe, the student-initiated civil rights movement in the United States, the decolonisation struggles that generated new international solidarity movements amongst students and the Prague Spring (Zancarini-Fournel 2008; Gildea et al. 2013).

The evidence from more recent events suggests that educated and young individuals are more likely to protest, as in the Arab Spring (Campante & Chor 2012), speaking further to the link between universities and protests. Dahlum and Wig (2021) point to several mechanisms that help us understand the relationship between collective action and the conditions at university: the social networks that emerge through daily interactions, the ease with which organisations are set up, but also the reduced opportunity costs by being somewhat shielded from the economic risks of the labour market, and the physical space of a university, which offers a suitable location for coordinating protests. Nikolayenko’s essay on the students involved in anti-corruption protests in Russia, often the largest group of protesters, speaks to this phenomenon. The case of Russia also underlines that youth-initiated protests are particularly strong when joined by other generations, as this enables the potentially particularistic demands of one generation to be generalised and seen as part of a broader desire for change (Krawatzek 2018).

The frequency with which university students and young people more generally are the core of protests, alongside their other creative forms of political involvement, highlights that young people, even if they do not see their behaviour as political—or strategically avoid the terminology of the political—often take an interest in their country’s public affairs or in specific local shortcomings. The independent involvement of young people has regularly also sparked fear amongst adults, in particular politicians. The fear that young people were potentially out of control has been a constituent element of discourses about youth ever since, channelling popular concerns about a destructive, radical or disoriented young generation (Pearson 1983).

In this issue, the studies on China and Belarus illustrate such concerns about independent youth as a threat that must be controlled (Doyon & Tsimonis, this issue; Nizhnikau & Silvan, this issue). In a comparative perspective, such fears about too much independence for young people speak to the fact that even under very repressive conditions, young people develop their own independent agency. Tellingly, even during the tight social and political control of Stalinism and the hierarchical state organisations in which young people had to be involved, young people pursued their own agendas, particularly at the local level (Fürst 2010), which accelerated during perestroika (Solnick 1998). Likewise, young people have used the various more recent state-initiated organisations across the former Soviet space for their own purposes (Hemment 2012).

Given young people’s subversive potential, sustained by the salient discourse of youth as a threat, non-democratic regimes in particular have tried to tightly control young people’s spaces of involvement. Forms of control vary across the spectrum of regimes and the kind of state-legitimising involvement that is expected from young people also depends on the political context. A major challenge for autocratic states is to avoid young people’s purely rhetorical commitment. Therefore, setting appropriate incentives for activism might genuinely increase young people’s commitment to the political regime and its values. In her analysis of Russian YouTubers, Anna Schwenck illustrates how incentives resonate amongst young people who support the moral outlook of the current regime, expressed through a combination of digital and offline activism. In their videos, activists strive to uphold public order and moral decency and the videos’ aesthetics speak to contemporary youth cultures, thereby reaching a large audience and spreading a regime-supporting vision in a way that is more subtle than official state propaganda. Moreover, such activities attest to the diverse repertoire of action that young people have at their disposal and which might become one of the regime’s stabilising vectors if it resonates with what the state wishes to achieve.

Under what conditions does young people’s activism serve to stabilise an autocratic political system? Over time, some autocracies have markedly improved their incentive structures to appeal to young people, which is part of a broader transformation of autocratic governance that has developed over the last two decades and contributes to their longevity (Levitsky & Way 2010; Morse 2012). In Schwenck’s analysis, this transformation of autocratic governance becomes clear through possible financial and reputational incentives that have generated a dynamic of competition amongst young people, illustrating the extent to which authoritarian regimes have gained in flexibility when they try to bring the citizenry on board to suppress dissenting voices. However, the fact that some young people support authoritarian forms of governance and conservative social norms should not be seen solely as a response to incentive structures, as this would reduce their own agency in that regard.

Nevertheless, it is far from certain what long-term effects such approaches have, and what kind of young people they might render genuinely loyal to the regime. Indeed, the analysis of Belarus illuminates both the potential success and the limitations. Since 2014, with the aim of controlling young people’s agency and reconnecting with them, the state-controlled youth movement saw a significant rejuvenation of its cadres and an extension of their social projects and volunteering. The regime hoped that these two moves would ensure that young people developed a sense of genuinely being on a mission for their country (Nizhnikau & Silvan, this issue). Even though this strategy helped depoliticise activities on the surface, the events of 2020 demonstrate that it could by no means contribute to legitimising the regime under conditions of blatant electoral fraud and violence against its citizens.

Another important and widely discussed example of more responsive authoritarianism concerns contemporary China. The Communist Party has developed a system that enables feedback and representation within strictly defined boundaries that do not challenge the overall political architecture (Truex 2016). Doyon and Tsimonis look at this aspect of Chinese politics and explore how the state has involved young people through top-down control but has also integrated them—at least to a certain extent—in the process of decision-making. Involving young people more actively reflects the fact that universities are spaces which facilitate independent thinking, including the discussion of political ideals, also in authoritarian contexts. In a country like China, this kind of activity is potentially troublesome, as growing spaces for manoeuvre for young people might undermine the state’s core interests. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has therefore proactively filled this ideological vacuum and pre-empted the very possibility of dissent by generating a façade of a space for youth to be involved and at the same time formulating clear expectations about how such involvement of young people is supposed to take place.

What kind of young people do tend to be involved in political and social activism? Previous research has demonstrated that young people are not equally likely to become agents for change. Two groups of young people have historically been singled out for their involvement: students and young workers. The crucial role of workers is notably discussed in Dobrivojević Tomić’s case study on post-1945 Yugoslavia. In the new socialist economy and intended rapid industrialisation, young workers were to transform into the future builders of socialism and crucially, through the social transformations that they contributed to, to also overcome the ethnic hatred of World War II. Young people aged 16–25 were core members of the national brigades, and in that transformation, young workers increasingly aspired to an urban lifestyle, leaving their peasant past behind.

As for students, countries that want to control the young population face a similar challenge, namely the need to expand the higher education sector and to attract leading researchers and the most brilliant young minds, while controlling student activism. The study on Russian students’ involvement shows that it is the better-educated young people in particular who get involved in political protests (Nikolayenko, this issue). Indeed, Nikolayenko illustrates a legacy related to place and the link between a higher quality of education and a greater frequency of student activism, even if the overall level of support for Navalny amongst young people remains low.⁷

Not unlike what we see in several post-Soviet states, the Chinese government has understood that young people are both a potential threat to regime stability but at the same time a unique resource for stability if used effectively. The extent to which Xi Jinping has governed into the university realm becomes particularly clear when contrasted with the approach adopted by his predecessor Hu Jintao, when a model of corporatist control was put in place—a system that maximised the quantitative involvement of young people, similar to the situation in Belarus or Russia, but demanded little ideological commitment, which was particularly striking in elite universities. Similar to the Russian case, universities with a higher quality of education were politically more active and had a more critically minded student body (Nikolayenko, this issue). In Hu’s China and Putin’s Russia, looser guidelines from the central government were more likely to be overlooked at places with higher levels of education, offering these students some independent agency.⁸

A comparative analysis of the dynamics at Chinese and Russian universities also highlights the potential trade-off autocrats face between tight control of the student body and the risk of students withdrawing from official politics. Such withdrawal and feelings of disaffection can be encountered across the globe and, in this issue, it is Doyon and Tsimonis who emphasise this when analysing the very low participation rates in the official political process. Perhaps even more importantly, controlling students in a way that is in stark misalignment with their convictions might push them into more remote spaces for political activism, spaces that are beyond the state’s control, as we observed in Belarus in 2020 and Russia.

Grassroots mobilisation always only sees a particular subset of (young) people getting involved. Not all young people feel that they have a right to speak up in public. But even those who state on paper that they have a low level of interest in politics may find themselves becoming activists. In this regard, friendship networks are undoubtedly a significant factor in understanding young people’s political behaviour, although it remains difficult to assess whether these are the result of, or the reason for, political engagement. In addition to friendship networks, contacts to friends and family members abroad and time spent abroad play into the politicisation of young people. The importance of transnational ties for political awareness is often mediated through political remittances, as the analysis of political attitudes in Russia shows. Indeed, Krawatzek and Sasse highlight that those who have been abroad or who possess a wide variety of transnational links are also more likely to express views critical of the government and state institutions, and they are more likely to approve of protests.

Another realm of activism is the artistic field, where conditions may permit the expression of alternatives to a greater extent than in other spheres (Krawatzek & Friess 2022). Music, graffiti and videos can all include acts of resistance, although it is important to avoid overstating the politicisation of young people’s activities in that regard. Clearly, not every cultural activity is an act of political contestation, even if some authorities may view it as such. Predominantly cultural youth clubs during the final years of the Soviet Union are one such example. Many of these clubs centred on the joint pursuit of leisure activities, even if some of them also became politically relevant bodies (Shubin 2006). In this issue, Florian Coppenrath’s study of rap in Kyrgyzstan illustrates that a politicisation of music occurs under specific socio-economic conditions and in interplay with public articulation of these issues. In this case, the pandemic brought significant societal and political shortcomings to the fore, while a social movement against corruption emerged. Rappers have thus become politically involved and their music has addressed topics such as corruption, environmental issues and violence against women.

Music or youth fashion that connects with a different social and political reality might also indirectly challenge a country’s political establishment. As research on youth cultures in Eastern Europe has underlined, Western films, music and fashion pressured established norms in the socialist East as they suggested a superior way of life in the capitalist West (Risch 2014). Culture therefore does not need to be explicitly social or political to question a status quo. Moreover, some music clearly has a political dimension, evident in efforts by authorities to censor music—at present and historically—but also in the role music plays in social movements or political rallies, for instance (Street 2013). More specifically for young people, an analysis of the music that youth movements prefer allows us to gain insights into their understanding of national identity, how the movements envision their country’s past and future, and what they demand of the present political situation (Pierobon 2014). The cultural point of access can therefore provide insights that other sources might not reveal to the same extent.

Conclusion

Young people are a fascinating microcosm that provides us with a salient angle to unpack the multiple layers of societies. Youth makes for a rapidly changing barometer of the kind of expectations that coexist in a society and the challenges that lie ahead. Adults project competing expectations and experiences onto youth, and young people themselves, in their political behaviour, respond to and challenge these discourses, leading to complex interactions between experimentation and regulation (Kirmse 2014). The experience of being young is one of profound transition and establishes a strong basis for future social identity and political values. Youth therefore always carries with it a strong temporal order for society, suggesting a way forward and also reconstructing how we ended up where we are. The category of youth then undergoes constant changes in meaning, although the term itself has become a constant in twentieth-century politics. The biological underpinning of ‘youth’ as a group is also in constant development given that membership of the group is short-lived.

Looking at the contradictions that characterise young people’s political desires at distinct moments in history, it is clear that there is no simple linear narrative that links youth and where societies are going. However, the analyses in this special issue underline what kinds of expectations persisted at different historical moments—a desire for stability and authority, or for unity and shared identity, or for democracy and human rights. Looking at our present time, it also becomes clear that it is impossible to identify a prevailing outlook amongst young people whose future is tainted by the impacts of climate change, economic inequalities, geopolitical tensions and the vulnerability of public health. Nevertheless, further economic progress, technological change and social innovation instil a sense of optimism in some young people.

To continue the investigation of how youth and politics intersect, a wide array of methodological approaches remains relevant, ideally in combination (Pilkington 2018). In-depth case studies and large-N comparisons have a contribution to make to the debate, as do methods such as participant observation, focus groups, surveys and discourse analysis. The essays in this issue help to highlight the many ways in which the topic can be approached and serve as a reference point for further explorations of this relationship.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Félix Krawatzek

Félix Krawatzek, Centre for East European and International Studies, Mohrenstraße 60, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 See also Nizhnikau and Silvan (this issue).

2 ‘Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Amongst Young Adults in U.S.’, Gallup, 25 November 2019, available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx, accessed 14 June 2022.

3 ‘Nostal’giya po SSSR’, Levada Centre, 19 December 2018, available at: https://www.levada.ru/2018/12/19/nostalgiya-po-sssr-2/, accessed 21 July 2022. See also Omelchenko and Sabirova (2016).

4 See also Schwenck, this issue.

5 For evidence on young people in Russia representing a cross-section of society in terms of their economic and political values, see Zavadskaya (2021).

7 ‘Vozvrashchenie Alekseya Naval’nogo’, Levada Centre, 5 February 2021, available at: https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/05/vozvrashhenie-alekseya-navalnogo/, accessed 15 June 2022.

8 But for an example of the very tight control that has developed in parts of Russia’s HSE, see Ludarova (2021).